On Tuesday, I watched a 27-year-old man
hold an electric toothbrush in his hand.
His fingers fumbled a bit at the switch.
But he flipped it, then sat astounded as the dry brush
shimmied and jumped in his palm.
This run on batteries, he asked?
Turning it upside down, his eyes lit with a toddler's wonder.
Perhaps you see nothing amazing in this.
But let me paint a picture of this man.
His chest is impossibly plumped, thick and rigid,
his skin mapped with stretch marks
where the muscle has exploded beneath.
His shaved head, a field of gristle and sweet spray,
is peppered with gouges where the blade sensed his blood
and slipped.
He is a child of single syllables,
grunts just under the radar.
I need to eat.
I'm real tired.
Think it's going to rain.
I like that shirt.
He is my son, crafted of fevers unleashed in jailhouse iron.
And now with a clear beyond cry, I
see that his punishment was never
there among the scabbed tattoos, sluggish clocks,
and open toilets.
His sentence began in the free, in that moment when
he turned a cheap chugging red toothbrush over
and over in his huge hands and said, look at this, ma.
Wow.
Look at this.